Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea

In Nothing to Envy, Barbara Demick interviews six ordinary North Koreans who defected to South Korea, and weaves together the profiles to present a fascinating picture of this closed society. I always found Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four to be a heavy-handed caricature of authoritarianism, but these interviews show a similarly repressive society with limited email, tight control of TV/radio content, restricted telephone/postal access, and crude (but apparently persuasive) political propaganda.